Posted
by
michael
on Tuesday November 02, 2004 @02:27PM
from the delete-button-deemed-harmful dept.

ptorrone writes "Never did we think we'd need to do a How-To on something which should be part of the basic functionality of a portable music player, but once you put your tunes on an iPod unfortunately it's a one-way sync unless you know the tricks for getting them off. Here's how to get your stuff off for free on a Mac or PC and how to re-enable a useful tool with a Hex editor." Cory Doctorow has been writing about this on boingboing recently; he discusses Apple's message to iPod owners.

It's not that first time such 'backup' tool is available, and it's also not the first time Apple found ways to neutralize such tool by way of a new version.

Additionally, it's relatively easy (compared to ripping CDs) to do it on iPod because Apple basically owns the device and its content, and they can do a lot to force users to comply. iPod doesn't need to follow a standard format (like CDs must play in all CD players), they can set/change the format to suit.

The article is quick to point out that "We're also hopeful Apple might consider not spending engineering time and lawyer fees on chasing after applications and developers who just want to give folks an obvious feature that's being left out only to appease the RIAA. At the end of the day, Apple needs to know that we're their customers, too."

However I think the BoingBoing article sums it up nicely - " Apple didn't have any choice. If they don't play nice with the suicidally stupid record industry, the industry will stop supplying music for the iPod."

When/If these online music distributors have gained enough market shares (maybe 30% of all music album buyers?), they might able to turn around and force the record industry to make changes, because it's not nice to lose 30% sales overnight.

Except the rebuttal that the article gives is not particularly useful. Apple's customer is joe normal user who could care less about copying files off their iPod, because they already have them on their computer. And this joe customer really wants to be able to easily buy a copy of Eminem's Mosh single and load it onto their iPod. Guess what to be able to do the second they may have to prevent the first. Which is more important to Apple and Apple's primary customers?

It has already been clearly established that the iPod is not a 'backup' medium and it is not acceptable to store the 'only' copies of your music on it. Quite regularly, answers in Apple's troubleshooting tips for iPod problems instruct the user to restore the Pod, which returns it to the completely empty default-install state.

So why would anyone be silly enough to keep the only copies of their music on their iPod, forcing them to then use this tool? With iTunes, you can't even get music onto the Pod without first importing it into the library. So it's a given that the music is already on your computer. (And where did it come from? If absolutely necessary, you can re-rip your CDs, or copy from your burned backups for iTMS or illegal music downloads.)

So tell me, is there a legitimate reason for your only copy of any song to be exclusively stored on your iPod?

well, back when i first got my ipod, i only had the original 400Mhz TiBook with the 10Gig hard drive. i quickly got in the habit of separately managing tracks that went on my iPod to save hard drive space: i'd rip stuff local, then would drag music to the ipod, and erase from local library. That's kinda been my modus operandi since then. Now that I have an AlBook with 80G HD... yeah i could go back to the "normal" way, though i'm already at 61% full.

I'll be holding off on that iTunes upgrade. While i'm typically a staunch Apple advocate, the fact that they're actively blocking apps from interacting with the library is deeply troubling to me.

My girlfriend (the most honest person I know) has just moved out of her house and off to college. Her iPod, which she has owned for a couple of years, was synced with her mom's Mac. For whatever reason her mom's HD fried.

My girlfriend was SOL. She had downloaded a good amount of music legitimately but now couldn't get any more because if she sync'd with her iTunes and the new music she'd gotten it would wipe her iPod clean.

What did we do? We restored her music to her PC using a tool similar to these.

So that's one legit reason. Some quick ones I can come up with off the top of my head include:

-getting a new computer-using two computers (i.e. laptop and desktop) and wanting be able to use both for adding music to the library-computer (hardware or software) is messed up in some way

and, as another poster said, it is YOUR iPod and YOUR music. why can't do with it as you please? What if I got the thing to be both my music player and a good sized portable HD for me to take with me as i travel the world? It's my iPod, after all.

That depends... if you're recording a movie off of television and playback on your mobile device (time shifting) or have made a copy of a movie that you legally own on DVD,Video Tape, etc (fair use) it is legal.

C'mon. This know-how is easily found with ten seconds and access to Google--hell, just submit a query using article title word for word [google.com] and you'll get a decent result. This information has been around for ages, and there's nothing particularly timely or new about it now.

This story is simply yet another plug for the folks over at Engadget.com, submitted by Mr. Torrone [slashdot.org] himself. (Hint: he's with Engadget.) They're trolling for hits, plain and simple.

At least grant us the courtesy of a disclosure statement if you're gonna let 'em plug their site under the guise of news.

did you not see the "we" with the link to engadget? it's pretty clear that i am with engadget. you might think this info is found in ten seconds with google, but a lot people have no idea which tools are free, which ones work and how to use them. if you can find _one_ article that shows how to do all this for macs, pcs and the hexedit info (again, all in one article that's easy to follow) please let me know. it would have been easier than spending a few hours doing this.

just to be clear, this was not a paid-placement. engadget has never paid for any placement on/. ever. i am not sure how much more clear it could have been that the article is from us. if you look at most of the stories, almost all are by the authors of the articles. and if they're not, it's someone not saying who they really are, any time i submit something i do it as me and make it clear who i am and who i write with.

Exactly! What the hell are all these people whinging about? The last time I wanted to move the music off my iPod, I just went into the/Volumes/ entry for it, and used find with an exec statement of "open". With iTunes library consolidation turned on, this happily copies everything back.

I sure hope this isn't another round of Apple Shareware Idiots charging people $29.99 for something that could have been done with a five second Applescript droplet.

Phillip, I don't deny that yours is a good article, but in roughly the past half-year you've had 14 articles accepted, every single one of which has plugged Engadget. Of these fourteen articles, the closest you've come to identifying yourself as part of Engadget is the use of "we" in three of these articles. Other times, you've written stuff like "the folks over at Engadget", which infers that you have nothing to do with Engadget. Usually, though, you make no indication one way or another of your relationship with Engadget, which is just generally misleading.

keep in mind, 99.999% of the time when i submit a story on/. someone edits it before it goes live. this post about getting content off your ipod isn't exactly what i submitted either. usually it's edited, links added or removed and then posted. you can of course think whatever you want and suspect anything, i'm honestly not trolling for hits, i'm trying to write cool stuff i think people will like and find useful. that said, i realize some people are up to no good, so it causes any reasonable person to be skeptical about any post.

Maybe I'm the freak, but when I read 'we' here I assumed it meant 'we iPod users', not 'we at a company I'm not going to state in this write-up but you'd see if you hover your cursor over the word we'. Sure, it's a link (now, anyway - not sure if it always was) but being a two letter green word among black lettering it's easy to miss.

I also don't see why you're defensive. It seems like every story involving a 'sister site' (or whatever) of Slashdot notes that in passing. Just start putting a disclaime

I appreciate seeing the article posted here and on Engadget. I was considering buying an iPod but I was not aware that Apple discourages iPod backups and future iPods will probably try to make backups impossible. Furthermore it seems iTunes does not allow you to re-download songs you that already paid for. This is ridiculous. So I would like to thank Endgadget and Slashdot for saving me the money I would have wasted in iPod/iTunes.

It's noon on the East Coast, this story is being read by tons of people from work, and a lot of people can be fired if their web proxy detects them downloading pictures like this [boingboing.net]. I can't direct link to the image because it's generated by a PHP script, but basically it's a topless woman holding a string to barely cover some of her nipples. You could get fired for looking at that at most companies, and it's on the main page of the story link to boingboing.net. It's on topic and people deserve this warning to keep their jobs!

If you must moderate me down so be it but I don't want anyone fired because a story reviewer was irresponsible.

I don't know when we started being so collectively condescending to the average computer user, but there was a time when you might tell a user to copy a file on their computer and reasonably believe they could do it. These days, most people approach the user like you might approach your retarded cousin who was raised by ferrets on a remote island: don't tell them anything, you might frighten or confuse them (unfrozen-caveman-lawyer style).

Personally, I have faith in people, and when someone asks me how to copy files off their iPod, I show them how to do it with the normal shell commands or file manager interfaces. The belief that people need a WYSIWYG GUI application to move files between storage devices is, I think, a result of the incorrect and insulting attitude that developers are so much smarter than their users.

These days, most people approach the user like you might approach your retarded cousin who was raised by ferrets on a remote island: don't tell them anything, you might frighten or confuse them (unfrozen-caveman-lawyer style).

That's because there are a whole fuckton of people out there who don't know, don't care, and refuse to learn even the most basic thing about computers (like copying files or not clicking on random attachments). The revel in their ignorance. Faced by such willful ignorance, the docum

I do point out how to do things in the shell to others and in online forums from time to time. But for example, one thing I was trying to help someone with was formatting a drive with FAT16 and an odd cluster size. I think you would agree that pointing out how to use format_msdos requrires a fair degree of precision and warning about how if they get the device wrong they could loose the main drive! I trust users to a point, but the shell can be very powerful so you want to be clear about what will happen

I don't know, maybe i'm just completely missing something here, but this article seems incredibly stupid to me. I just don't understand why you'd have to do any of this at all. Why would you not be able to get them off the iPod? In Windows you can press F3 and type *.mp3 in the stupid search box and it will list every MP3 on your iPod and you're free to copy them where-ever you like. You don't need EphPod or a hex editor or any of that, and you never did. -_-

If you use a mac, there are plenty of graphical applications, some free and some shareware (that you can get from versiontracker.com), that allow you to easily get songs off your iPod and access it through an iTunes-like interface:

1) iPodRip2) iPod Access

And some cool apps that let you download RSS feeds and news to your iPod like "Pod2Go". Just search versiontracker.com for "ipod", you'll get plenty of results.

The only problem with doing a copy like that is that it doesn't bring across your playlists, play counts or ratings. Also, songs that are.wav's do not have their meta data brought across as they cannot contain any.

Neither of the programs listed in the article seem to do either, and as a developer of this exact type of software, I know how valuable it can be.

Here are some of the options I find worthy (Mac OS X only):
- iPodRip [thelittleappfactory.com] - I wrote this, so it is a plug for me. Recovers everything. Ten unrestricted

Why yes I have actually done this. Because it's pretty freaking easy if you have a Mac and an iPod. In fact if you had some device like an iPod that mounted as a disk, wouldn't you go exploring to see how it was structured?

But I guess you're too bitter to actually be inquistive and can't imagine someone else knowing what they are talking about.

You are partially incorrect. It's true that the files are put in random directories, but the filenames remain the same.

$ cd/Volumes/iPod$ find./ -iname *portishead*

If you wanna get fancy, you can import them by checking the "copy imported music to iTunes" and do:for i in `find./ -iname *portishead*`; do open $i; done

This will reimport all of your portishead songs. I should know, I just did it because my hard drive died a couple of weeks ago and my backup was bad. This was the only way I could get some of my music back.

I would hardly say that Apple trying to protect its relationship with the music content providers, which is the whole reason that the iTunes Music Store exists in the first place, not to mention the online store with by far the highest marketshare, is tantamount to Apple telling its customers to "eat shit and die" [boingboing.net].

His preemptive rebuttals are also complete bullshit. Yes, we're the "customers", not Sony/BMG. And he himself admits that the record companies are idiots; yes, those are the idiots that Apple has to deal with. A lot of people think it was a miracle Apple/Steve Jobs got them even to agree to this "crazy experiment" in the first place.

Additionally, getting music back off the iPod is not part of the advertised capabilities or features of the service, period, and never was. Remember iTunes 4.0b12? It let you go both ways between every iPod and iTunes under the sun, with no limits. You could two-way sync every iPod and iTunes library on earth. Remember iTunes 4.0, and its internet music sharing? The record industry might not be telling Apple *exactly* the specifics of how to implement the protections, but Apple is under pressure to not make it too "easy" to "share" music on a wide scale, while still making the DRM and protections as transparent as it possibly can.

Further, as long as the iPod is just a freaking disk, its contents will be able to be retrieved. But Apple CANNOT look as if it is passively ignoring things that are perceived by the music industry to be "dangerous", whether they are or not. Yes, Apple can try to help the music industry understand, and even pressure them in the right direction - and probably has, quite a bit, frankly. Remember, this whole online download thing is in its utter infancy.

If you want to hate or blame Apple for "selling out", and saying that they should just tell people like Sony/BMG to go fuck themselves, and if they lose them they lose them, fine...that's you call. And no one is forcing you to use or buy any of Apple's services. This is Apple's service and products, and they're running them how they feel they have to to ensure the iTunes Music Store's continued existence. Do you think they WANT to make things hard on customers? Quite the opposite! And maybe someday Apple will have the leverage to start pressing these things with the music industry - Jobs believes people should really be able to do what they want with their music. But people also want music from the major labels, so you can't piss them off right off the bat. What to do? Frankly, I think Apple is in the right here, and Cory Doctorow is the one who can eat shit and die.

I think one important aspect to Apple's constant user downgrades of the iPod/iTMs is that they stop customers from doing what Apple tells them to do: Back up their songs.

Oddly, Apple's iTMS wants it both ways. They say they are selling you a license for the song, not the physical song. But when you lose a song, they treat it like you lost physical property, even though you paid an apparently perpetual license fee that allows you to have the song and play it.

If something happens to your iTunes library, Apple will not let you re-download those songs again even though the "Fair Play" DRM insures that their could be no piracy involved, since the songs would be locked to the same computers as the original. Tough luck, says Apple, it's your fault for not backing up. Naturally, one would think that the iPod's large disk drive and auto synch would be the perfect way to back up songs, but the schizophrenic Apple won't let you copy your songs off iPod. (Yes, there are ways, but Apple may close that back door at any time.) iPod owners are constantly having to ask on Forums how to recover their accidentally erased iTMS library from their iPod because Apple doesn't officially allow anyway to copy their songs from your iPod to restore their music. Ridiculous.

Their is literally no customer advantage to the Apple downgrades. And copying your legal songs is not illegal. I'm glad that Corry is staying on this.

Technically they should. Of course a reasonable replacement fee of $2 to pay for the extra materials would be fair. If they want to call it a license instead of a product, then the physical form should not matter. This is especially true with software. Companies at the moment are really enjoying having their cake and eating it too. If I damage a device I bought, like an MP3 player, I'm out of luck. At the same time, I don't hear manufacturers complaining about people copying the device for a friend.

Stores dont give you a new copy of your music cd when you break it with a sledgehammer now do they?

Now why are you breaking your CDs with a sledgehammer? If I'm making a habit of taking a sledgehammer to my powerbook, the $10 for the iTunes album I bought is the least of my worries.

However, the RIAA argument as to why it's "stealing" to copy CDs is entirely based on the fact that, when you buy a CD, you aren't buying the physical CD, you're buying a perpetual license to play that song for personal use. If that's the position the RIAA wants to take, then I think the license should carry with it an implicit promise to ensure that the work remains accessible to the purchaser of said license.

In other words, if I'm paying them for the right to listen to the song, then they should have to let me listen to that song, independent of whether the storage medium is damaged. At the very least, provide a free download for life (no medium).

Otherwise, the RIAAs position becomes that you are not really buying the CD and you are not really buying the perpetual license to play the song. What then are you buying?

It is very easy to back up your songs, as they exist both on your computer and on your ipod. It's data. Copy it to backup media.

There is no reason that consumers should have to make a 3d copy of their music when the iPod serves as a perfect up-to-date mirror the iTunes library. Apple's official policy is that they do not support anyway to recover your legally purchased music from your iPod back to your computer. Yes, Slashdot posters can figure out a way, but most people's parents and non-techie friends wi

I was actually considering the iPod as my first ever Mac device purchase (although I have had some Mac hand-me-downs before). But after all that, I can hardly see the point. It seems to me that iPod just lost its supposedly number one reason for being better than the competition - the much advertised "ease of use." Without "ease of use" what is left beyond the fashion accessory argument?

Since Wal*Mart is starting to put the squeeze on the RIAA and the music pimps, they will see that it is in their own best interest to maintain an ITMS as a hedge against being pushed, like all Wal*Mart suppliers, into dependency, servitude and eventual oblivion as independent entities.

Wall*Mart is NOT good for America.

Wall*Mart causes price wars that they ultimately win on volume (buy cheap in China and sell cheap in the 'States [and let the volume take care of the shipping,]) and everyone they rub up aga

Just use gtkpod, and copy the music to and from the ipod using a convenient graphical interface. As for resetting the ipod if you've screwed it up with DRM, I find the following command works every time: dd if=ipod_firmware of=/dev/sda1. Not graphical yet, but perhaps in the next version of gtkpod?

Just use the iPod support plugin in Winamp [winamp.com]. Not only does it let you sync and listen to your iPod in Winamp, it allows you to "Copy Selection to Hard Drive". There are still some kinks in it. It has a habit of creating literal album names for directories (which is a problem for DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing...". Windows doesn't like them ellipses).

Of course worse comes to worst I navigate into the iPod in Windows Explorer, CTRL+C all the directories and CTRL+V it onto my Harddrive. No big deal.

Does anyone have some advice for how to enable the playing of.m4a files off of the iPod in Knoppix Linux? I can hook my iPod to the machine at work, and can even access the hard drive...and I can play the files in mp3 encoding via Knoppix's XMMS. But to play AACs requires some special plugin, which in turn requires additional libraries, and they all need to be compiled, and it's all beyond my ability to make work with this read-only LiveCD implementation.

For one thing, its been known ever since the iPod came out that you couldnt remove music easily from a iPod, but it was very easy to get the music OFF the iPod, just Apple didnt tell you how.

But regardless I dont see why this is such a big deal... it was never advertised as being able to do this, and it keeps the RIAA from being total bastards and getting a law passed banning ALL hard drive music devices... Hell Apple isnt the only manufacturer who does this to its MP3 player so why is it a big deal... es

When I had an ipod, I used EphPod [ephpod.com] to deal with my music (because iTunes doesn't run on Win ME). EphPod is pretty good on its own, and it has the "feature" that allows you to download from the ipod to your computer. You click and drag. Pretty simple..

Doesn't all music on an iPod come from a computer? Why not get it from there? The only point I can see to this is the argument of hard drive crash, but there's no need to damn Apple for not providing tools they never said they would.

Just back the files you didn't get from your own CD's to data CD's and be done with it.

Doesn't all music on an iPod come from a computer? Why not get it from there?

The point is music piracy. You put your music on your iPod and carry it to someone else's computer, then give them 40 GB of music files. That's the real purpose of this functionality, iPod as sneakernet.

I just bought an Iriver ifp 795 and i can't get music files off it either. You can use it as a hard drive for other types of files but not musics ones, and only through the iriver music manager software. I hope somebody comes up with a hack for iriver products also.

1) Plug in the iPod and make sure it mounts as a disk. Note the name of the disk (it will be whatever you named your iPod, likely John Doe's iPod).2) Open a new finder window and press cmd-shift-G. In the sheet that opens up, type the following: "/Volumes/John Doe's iPod/iPod_Control/Music"3) Your finder window will go the the music folder. It will look empty, but it's not. In the folder *above* the music folder, the music folder itself will appear as a greyed out folder. Drag this icon to wherever you'd like to put it. The copy will begin.4) Once the copy completes, enjoy the music.

once upon a time OS X 10.3 messed up my HD completely with the encryption of a large file and not enough HD space. that meant total system crash, and therefore mp3 collection gone. after searching around, i came across ipodrip [thelittleappfactory.com] which trivially restored my data off the ipod. costs $10, but then $10 compared to a whole music collection is peanuts -- and you want to support the smart guys who figured out to undo the weirdness of the ipod filesystem...

It's like everyone was just waiting around for Apple to do something like this, and now that they've done it, no matter how minisculy important it is, OMFG APPLE IS FORCE-FEEDING US FECES.

There's dozens of programs out there that let you download from an iPod (so many have been linked already that I won't even bother) the one difference between all those and iPod Download? iPod Download is an iTunes plug-in. Is it really a stretch to imagine the RIAA pulling their music from the iTMS (or even suing App

Perhaps because the iPod isn't DRM'ed? If you read everybody elses comments.. you'll see that it's relatively trivial to copy files off of the iPod through the finder, terminal, or through windows explorer.

If you don't like what Apple is doing (and this is certainly not the first time they've done something I don't like) then don't buy their products. Don't hack the damn player just so you can have your own music. Vote with your feet. It's the only way they'll get the message.

The iPod was the only Apple device I'd considered buying in about 20 years. (I learnt my lesson from the way I was treated with my last purchase which was an Apple IIe). Its this sort of nonesense that means I won't do it. Other players

Anyone who halfway knows their way around a *nix machine could do this with their eyes closed.

For those of you who do not, enable "Hard Disk Usage" on your ipod via iTunes. Unmount/mount your ipod. Open your terminal and "cd" into the music folder of your ipod, located in your devices directory. Google search how to copy directories in any *nix environment and you're all done.

No need for someone else to write you a pretty GUI, after all you read/. so do it yourself through the terminal.

what do/.ers think is the most hackable portable music player? I have a few things that I would love to do with my player, such as making audio "flash cards" for the languages I am learning, along wiht the word printed on the screen(I'm learning Chinese and Japanese, so it would be nice if I could take advantage of the fact that the iPod can render all those characters).
It's pretty obvious it's possible to do this on the iPod, but Apple won't release SDKs for it. Are there any players that will let you program them to achieve such a thing?

My first mp3 player was the Rio500. This device inspired a lawsuit against the maker, Diamond Multimedia, because the RIAA claimed it would enable piracy. The case was thrown out of court, but just to cover their asses from additional legal challenges, Diamond disabled the capability for files to easily be copied from the player back to a computer.

A few months ago I just upgraded and bought an iPod 40gig. I really appreciate it over my Rio500. I am disappointed that I can't easily transfer music from the player to my computer, but I can understand their rationale.

Open Pod is an applescript for iTunes that builds a playlist from the files on your iPod, which you can then copy to your music library. This thing saved me hours of re-ripping when I deleted all the music from my hard drive to save space, not knowing that I "couldn't" copy the music back from my iPod (I was an iPod newb when this happened). I don't know if this works in Windows. I would guess not...

I've never had a problem getting the songs off of my iPod, especially since I use iTunes to organize my music. The music is just stored in a hidden directory on the iPod, so all you have to do is copy that directory, and then tell iTunes (or any other good jukebox) to import a directory. Tada! Music transferred. It's not like Apple made it really difficult to remove it.

I've had my iPod since 2001 and have often used to transfer songs. It's really quite simple. Just open up a Terminal (on OSX) or Cygwin (on Windows) and browse to your iPod (usually something like/Volumes/"My iPod" or/cygdrive/f.) Then it's just one line :

find . -name "*.mp3" -exec cp {}/temp_folder \;

That will copy all the MP3 files to some temporary place. Then just drop the folder on iTunes (make sure you have the "let iTunes keep your music organized" option turned on) and it will copy everything nice and neatly to your music library.

For a while, Apple was trying to keep folks with 3rd party 802.11g cards from using them with AppleAirPort2.kext, their AirPort Extreme driver. It started when I discovered that you could use their original AirPort Express driver with a Linksys WPC54G simply by changing some stuff in the Info.plist file. Apple responded by locking non-Apple hardware out in the driver - they were checking the PCI device ID against a fixed string in the driver and puking if it wasn't correct. Simply changing the string they were checking against was sufficient to make things work again. So what I did was write a perl script to make the whole patch process totally droolproof and post it at OSXHax [osxhax.com]. Every month or so Apple would release an updated driver (this was early on when 802.11g wasn't yet finalized), and I'd have to change the perl script to find the new location of the string. Finally, Apple gave up. And now if you plug a Buffalo or older Linksys 802.11g cardbus card into an older Powerbook, you too can have AirPort Express just like owners of new PowerBooks do. Only now, you don't have to actually do anything.

So I encourage... someone... to turn the binary patching stuff into a nice, easy perl script.:-)

Has anyone considered that Apple actually made it rather easy to do this?

Had they been the real evil corporation that Apple-haters tend to want to cast them as, they could quite easily have arranged for something like byte scrambling to take place as the music tracks transferred from iTunes to the iPod.

Then, getting the data back to the computer from an iPod would have been a lot harder.

It reminds me of the early days of DVD players:

Hollywood insisted that DVD manufacturers install region coding to get a license.

Manufacturers did so, but realized sales outside Region 1 would be hampered due to far fewer titles available.

Manufacturers made it rather easy to disable region coding, to the extent that a salesman could do it on the way to a cash register.

Result: region coding only a minor nuisance to those who had the desire to bypass it.

you CAN use it as a hard drive, only you cannot copy your music from iPod to computer by just dragging it through the windows or mac filesystem. any other non music files (anything not in the itunes library) are a different story.

you cannot copy your music from iPod to computer by just dragging it through the windows or mac filesystem

Why not? They're just files. Unless Apple has changed it drastically since I last tried my brother's IPod, the music files are stored there with random file names. Which is not a huge problem, since the mp3tags are still present, and most decent music software can rename the file based on the mp3 tag.

You can copy items to the file system.
Music files copied to the file system wont show up in the iPod's play list, but if you've got enough sapce... just dupe all your songs... one in the music library on the iPod and another in the file system.

Yes, the iPod is an external drive, and you can see your music (if you enable hidden files and folders), but it is not organized well at all. There are folders like F01 through F19, each one containing a portion of your library. There is a file which contains the entire database of your playlists, and how they map to the files - it is this mapping that the programs exploit, making it useful to view your songs as "artist - title", by playlist, and copy off in that fashion.

Sure, you could just copy F19/*.mp3, if you want. Then you could re-create all of your playlists. There are just easier ways.

He doesn't own an iPod because you can't get music off? But as numerous posts have shown you can in fact do just that. So what was his "legitimate" insight into not owning an iPod apart from his obvious irrational dislike of them?

If he stated he didn't like the interface, I could understand - I would disagree, but I know there there really is not going to be an interface that pleases everyone. If he stated he was displeased with sealed batteries, again you could argue about if they were good or bad but

The iTunes information is stored in a "special" way so that's it's not readily displayed on the desktop. You can enable the iPod to also act like a normal firewire drive as well, which you can copy files on and off of, however music you copy on to the iPod this way can't played on the iPod, but can be copied off normally at a different computer.

It's analogous to having two partitions on the iPod, the normal iPod/iTunes parition and the straight up firewire/usb partition. Only music imported through iTune